Alan Blackwell - Biographic Narrative

This page isn't a CV - just a narrative framework for links to places
where I have been. (Or a typically pathetic piece of Web-enabled
self-aggrandisement, if you prefer). Sadly, almost all links on this
page are broken (as of June 2006), which demonstrates the transience
of the web as an archival medium. What page has remained the same
since I last revised all those links in 2003? Why, this one of course!

I was born in
Wellington,New Zealand.
(webcam).
I have been happily married for 20 years to (the very patient)
Helen Arnold, and we have
rather more recently (May 2001) acquired a delightful daughter,
Elizabeth.

I attended
Newlands College,
where I developed an enduring bad habit: attempting everything that
interests me. This included individual and team sports, debating,
amateur dramatics, regional scouting administration and a couple of
appearances as a lay preacher. I still pursue a wide range
of leisure activities - all
different from the ones I knew at school.

Academic things that have caught my attention

I have been studying at universities on and off over 18 years now.
As at high school, I have considered anything that catches my interest.
To date, this unfortunate habit has lead me to study:

Intense curiosity about everything in the world, combined with an
apparent attempt to obtain degrees in as many fields as possible, has
left me with a lot of possibly unrelated knowledge that I am trying to
glue together in some interesting manner. While waiting for this to
happen, I have a number of other ways of passing the time.

Ways of making money

In between university degrees, I found it necessary to try and apply
what I just learnt to the business of obtaining food and shelter. I
have worked for three different companies:

At the time I worked there, Progeni was the largest software house in
New Zealand, with over 200 employees, and several sales offices in
Australia and the USA. Due to some kind of corporate magic, there is
still a Progeni Corporation in
the USA, but they do not seem to mention the (presumably defunct) New Zealand
parent. I worked for six years in the Control Systems Division, where
I built computer systems to automate factories and laboratories.

CCL is arguably the oldest "technology consultancy" in the UK, and was
the first tenant on England's first Science Park - a real estate
marketing concept that has since transformed the English suburban
landscape. As an "artificial intelligence engineer", I built real-time
diagnostic and encryption systems for some of the largest companies in
the UK, including a
smartcard gas prepayment system
for British Gas, and some early development of
D-MUSE,
an AI toolkit for distributed agent-based systems developed for the
Defence Research Agency.

Hitachi Europe Advanced Software Centre

The Advanced Software Centre
(later Hitachi Enterprise Software Solutions)
was established as a European base for
Hitachi's international software tools business. As the technical
leader of a software tools development group, I worked on hypertext
tools (a product called HyLink - predating the WWW,
and with similar capabilities, but supporting bi-directional links),
visual programming (a product called
AppGallery),
and software reuse (I led the team that developed ObjectReuser, later
called WebReuser: a reuse support environment).
I was a regular speaker and writer at international meetings,
giving commercial perspectives on the topic of software reuse.